Patti Jo "PJ" Hirabayashi is one of the pioneers of the North American Taiko movement. She is the founder of TaikoPeace, President of Kodo Arts Sphere America (KASA), and co-founder of Creatives for Compassionate Communities-a grassroots art-ivist group originating in San Jose, California. She is also the Artistic Director Emeritus and charter member of San Jose Taiko, the third taiko group to form in the United States. Her signature composition, "Ei Ja Nai Ka", is a celebration of immigrant life expressed in taiko drumming, dance, and voice that continues to be performed around the world. She and her husband Roy Hirabayashi are recipients of the 2011 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. Personal life Hirabayashi was born on May 18, 1950 in San Rafael, California. She is a third-generation Japanese (Sansei) and was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a child, PJ got involved in dance, studying styles such as tap, ballet, and acrobatics. She attended Irvington High School where she would study piano and guitar in addition to dance. For college, she initially attended California State University, Hayward (CSU Hayward) where she majored in math for two years with the plan to become a computer analyst. PJ's years in college coincided with the Civil Rights Movement, which gained a lot of steam in colleges across the nation in terms of organized protest. While in college PJ began to become aware of the internment experience of WWII and of other injustices to people of color, and because of this she began to get involved in community activism and Asian American studies. She then transferred to University of California, Berkeley with a Social Science major (a combination of ethnic studies, sociology, and psychology) where she focused on Asian-American studies. After obtaining her degree in Social Science from Berkeley, she spent a year in Japan before returning to San Jose to obtain a master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning from San Jose State University in 1977. Her master's thesis is on the preservation of San Jose's Japantown, and has become a widely used reference for research and for community action committees currently discussing the preservation of San Jose Japantown. From 1977 to 1979, she served as Acting Coordinator for "Asian American Communities" classes and supervisor for students gaining fieldwork experience